I would like to suggest this is not the safest place for Syrian refugees. It is safer than Syria certainly. Yet the lucky ones will settle in Europe, where even with the occasional terror attack, murder is significantly less common.

Ted Cruz, who of course is O’Brien in 1984, and has the look of a man who would bloodlessly feed your face to rats for the crime of ideological heresy, already has ascribed the San Bernardino shootings, as is his custom, without supporting evidence, to “radical Islamic terrorism.”

This would be the Cruz whose response to ideological violence directed at Planned Parenthood was, “The media promptly wants to blame [the shooter] on the pro-life movement when at this point there’s very little evidence to indicate that.” Despite being only one of countless examples of Cruz’s clinical weaseliness and gross denialism, these are qualities shared by many like him.

They urge us to look away from the common, everyday violence in America responsible for the deaths of thousands, much due to the easy availability of weaponry, while exaggerating to the point of the gargantuan, domestic jeopardy at the hands of jihad.

Likewise, the emergent pattern in recent years of ideologically inspired rightist terrorism conveniently escapes their notice, and remarkably their concern. Of course, like climate change, if it isn’t there, why should you have to address it?

Absent miracles as equivalently likely as the supersonic flight of swine, mental illness and criminality will remain with us. Yet we are told by some, that until that day of miracles comes, we are restricted to only impotence in the face of gun-abetted genocide.

We will continue to be told by this same contingent, that guns are a benign and benevolent presence, even a definingly patriotic one. Their position would be that if a deranged man utilizes a weapon for the murder of masses, the derangement must be addressed, though never the weapon’s accessibility.

A nation that responds to the incessant, abundant killing of its citizens by other of its citizens with political ideology, in this case, radical idolatry of firearms, along with non-existent constitutional claims, is a nation adrift.

It is the loss of understanding, or willing failure of acknowledgement of the  basic criteria for civilization, what entails civilized life, and identifies a nation as civilized.

Gun mythology, gun fetishism, historical ignorance, and the National Rifle Association continue to hold the nation’s collective testicles in an industrial vice-grip. In conjunction, Republican governors and legislatures in states they control have enacted gun laws so promiscuous as to be epically irrational, monumentally demented.

Any person holding the belief, or any nation whose citizenry in any significant numbers hold the belief that the more guns available, the more armed citizens walking around in their communities, the safer they will be, have succumbed to a mental dissonance that is pitiful and ultimately suicidal.

Americans are famously addicted to their televised and cinematic shedding of blood. Lucky for them, neither a movie ticket nor a television is necessary to enjoy it now.